CRISPR analysis suggests that small circular single-stranded DNA smacoviruses infect Archaea instead of humans
César Díez-Villaseñor () and
Francisco Rodriguez-Valera
Additional contact information
César Díez-Villaseñor: Universidad Miguel Hernández
Francisco Rodriguez-Valera: Universidad Miguel Hernández
Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-9
Abstract:
Abstract Smacoviridae is a family of small (~2.5 Kb) CRESS-DNA (Circular Rep Encoding Single-Stranded (ss) DNA) viruses. These viruses have been found in faeces, were thought to infect eukaryotes and are suspected to cause gastrointestinal disease in humans. CRISPR-Cas systems are adaptive immune systems in prokaryotes, wherein snippets of genomes from invaders are stored as spacers that are interspersed between a repeated CRISPR sequence. Here we report several spacer sequences in the faecal archaeon Candidatus Methanomassiliicoccus intestinalis matching smacoviruses, implicating the archaeon as a firm candidate for a host. This finding may be relevant to understanding the potential origin of smacovirus-associated human diseases. Our results support that CRESS-DNA viruses can infect non-eukaryotes, which would mean that smacoviruses are the viruses with the smallest genomes to infect prokaryotes known to date. A probable target strand bias suggests that, in addition to double-stranded DNA, the CRISPR-Cas system can target ssDNA.
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-08167-w Abstract (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-08167-w
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-08167-w
Access Statistics for this article
Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie
More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().